


Ashes

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Drama, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:40:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28279257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Roy has been missing for just under seventy hours when Ed gets the call.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 22
Kudos: 472
Collections: Roy/Ed Week 2020





	Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> I was lying in bed unable to sleep and came up with this whole bit of nonsense for "changed" for [Roy/Ed Week](https://royedpalooza.tumblr.com), and I am UPSET about it. I tried several times to talk myself out of writing it, but the parts of it that had come to me were so specific that my brain and my better judgment went to war, and evil prevailed. :'|
> 
> SO! **Major warning:** this takes place immediately after and revolves around a torture scene that you won't see. Some of it will be referenced clearly, though. If it helps you decide whether to read this, I personally find torture extremely squicky, so the content is… not as bad as it could be. (P.S. If you have similar feelings on this topic, don't watch the series "The Tudors". It was aaaaaaAAAAAAAA)
> 
> If that's not a particular sticking point for you, general heads up that this is more or less hurt/comfort, but by GOD is it whump-heavy. I don't like writing sad shit!!!!!!! WHY ARE WE HERE!!!!!! >:(
> 
> Anyway, set several years post-Brotherhood; Ed doesn't have the automail arm, but I wasn't too specific about much else because it didn't seem particularly relevant.
> 
> Remaining prompt fills in the coming days will be fluffballs, and that is a promise! Feel free to skip this one. ♥

Ed has not slept in three days.

Not… really, at least. Snatches of half-dozing catnaps here and there; minutes at a time of dragging his feet along the blurry line between conscious and not. His balance is shot, so he tips sideways sometimes. He’s started to see things—flickers and shadows at the corners of his eyes that vanish when he turns his head.

Al keeps telling him not to give up hope, but it’s awfully fucking hard not to examine every single second of the worst-case scenarios when the hours just stretch on forever like this. During the day, yeah, he and Riza can investigate shit and interview people and walk back and forth across the last place Roy was seen until their feet blister, but at night—

At night, it feels like there’s nothing to do except give up, over and over and over.

Dreaming’s worse than being awake anyway.

He doesn’t fucking care anymore—why it happened; what he looks like. He doesn’t care about anything. Which is why he’s lying on the living room couch with his arms around Roy’s pillow from the bed, staring at the wall and hashing and rehashing and digging feverishly through the raw mess of his recollections for something that he might have _missed_ when—

The phone rings.

It must be two in the morning.

He’s up and in the hallway so fast that his head spins—hard enough to make him wonder if he’s going to black out at the same instant that he picks up the phone.

“Ed,” Riza says. Static spits on the line; he can’t feel his fingers gripping the receiver. “He called. Outskirts of West City. I’m sending a car for you.”

Ed tries to swallow and can’t; tries to breathe and chokes on it. “Is he—”

“He isn’t going to die,” Riza says, and Ed’s whole body goes to pins and needles. “He gave me a rundown. It’s—not—good, but…” She takes a deep breath much more successful than his attempts, although it rattles on the way back out. “I’ll see you at the hospital, all right? We’ll… sort this out.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, despite the desert in his mouth.

  


* * *

  


The car took twenty minutes to arrive—or an hour and a half, depending on whether you’re gauging by the clock in the hallway or by how long it felt like. Ed called Al and woke him up. Then Ed stood in the foyer for a geologic age, and then he panicked and ran upstairs and changed his shirt. He still doesn’t know why he felt like that was necessary. At least it was something to do.

He almost threw up when the driver—some poor corporal he’s never even met, or maybe has and just doesn’t remember—asked him how he was. He doesn’t know what he said; probably something numb-tongued and stupid. His brain is buzzing like a broken porch light; the insects keep swarming every time he tries to access a sliver of intellect. He can hear his heart pounding. He can hear the breath rasping in and out of his chest.

The fact that there was nothing that anyone could do, and no way that anyone could have known, has not helped a fucking whit. The universe is not kind. Life is an accident. Everything is random, and indifferent, and cold. Nothing— _nothing_ —is fucking fair.

Ed did the math. The drive should be three and a half hours. If he’d had the wherewithal to take care of himself—and it really is wherewith _al_ ; Al’s the only reason he’s alive after three fucking days of this—he’d be hydrated, and this would be worse. But he’s not. He doesn’t feel a goddamn thing. He feels like a crackle of half-hearted electricity holed up in a glass bottle; he feels like the echo of a conviction. Somebody should shake him. Somebody should wake him up.

He gave up on that, too—on the desperate, gritty-eyed, last-ditch hope that this was a dream. He tried to believe it. He wanted to.

Roy’s alive. That’s the important thing. That’s the only important thing; that’s the only thing that _really_ matters; that’s the only thing that they wouldn’t be able to move forward from.

But _move forward_ is a very different thing from _fix_.

_Alive_ is very different from _okay_.

The part of him that clings to cowardice, that doesn’t want to find out, doesn’t want to _know_ —the part him that’s trying to brace itself and only managing to shiver uncontrollably almost wishes that it was a longer drive.

  


* * *

  


Three and a half hours. Time has stretched and collapsed and condensed in impossible ways this week; hours have winked by, and individual seconds have sprawled endless. He can tell that he won’t remember much of the drive except the tidal rhythm of it—terror washing in, crashing cold; each wave of it receding with a hiss as something more like dread.

The car has not technically stopped along the curb in front of the hospital before Ed flings himself out of it.

There’s a nurse waiting at the door who says “Ah” as she lets him in, which means that Riza must have prepped her; Riza thinks of fucking everything; they are so damn _lucky_ to—

The nurse said “One-oh-three” and pointed; it felt like Ed was straining to hear that much. It feels like he’s swimming now. It feels like the air of this hallway is gelatin; it feels like his legs are lead; it feels like another dream. If he wakes up—again, for real—to an actual phone call, to Riza saying _Nothing yet_ or _It’s really bad_ or _Ed, we found the body_ —

He won’t. He can’t. It can’t—there isn’t—

Al said _Breathe, Brother_. Al said _You can do this, Brother; you’ve survived things that were worse than this_. Al said _He’s going to need you to be strong, Ed, but when you’ve done that, you’re going to come home and tell me what_ you _need_.

Ed needs Roy. He needs sleep. He needs a good fucking cry, probably; there’s just too much tangled up in him, and all the vines have thorns, and if he can release some fraction of the strangling pressure, maybe—

He sees Riza, first, because of the angle as his feet carry him closer to the doorway.

And then he sees—

Roy.

The stark blue-purple bruises cover so much of Roy’s face that it looks like somebody went at him with a paintbrush. His right cheek is swollen; the edges of a gash across his nose show past a strip of gauze, and it sure as hell looks like a break. His lip is split in three places; there’s more gauze running up his right cheek. His hair is matted—not just blood; there’s something muddy-looking caked up in it. They cleaned the rest of his face off so well that it takes Ed three full heartbeats to figure out what the muck must be.

Ash.

Roy’s hands rest in his lap on top of one of the standard-issue scratchy mint-green blankets—or, at least, Ed thinks they do. They must. They’re so mummified with gauze that Ed can’t—

The right one looks—

Wrong. The shape is wrong. There’s—

Riza has her hand on Roy’s arm; she squeezes gently before she stands up. “I’ll see if I can find you something to eat, sir.”

“Thank you,” Roy says.

Ed attempts to send an urgent missive to his feet demanding that they fucking _move_.

It takes a few more heartbeats and a breath before they listen, but his heart must be on the verge of bursting out of him, because Riza hasn’t even made it halfway across the room.

She grazes her hand over his shoulder as she passes, but he doesn’t feel it.

He sits down in the chair she vacated, which should probably seem warm.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he says. It doesn’t stick in his throat quite as stubbornly as he expected.

Roy’s hands shift, and Ed’s eyes flick down to them. When he coaxes them back up to Roy’s face, the expression—

“You want to know who,” Roy says. “And why.” His voice is so scrapingly hoarse that Ed wonders what the hell he’s been yelling about.

But it wouldn’t have been yelling, would it?

Ed forces himself to breathe again, deeper this time. Al was right. Al’s always right.

“I don’t care,” he says.

“Yes,” Roy says, “you do.”

The first whiplash instinct in him urges him to snarl. He is worn _through_ ; he’s dizzy and hungry and hallucinating; he has reached the end of his damn rope, and he is hanging from the last unraveling thread. Roy _Mustang_ cannot fucking sit here and tell him what to _care_ about when the motive won’t change a single fucking iota of what happened, what was _done_ —

But Ed has to drag in another breath to put any voice behind the anger, and his brain shudders, and a little connection settles into place.

It doesn’t fucking matter what he wants.

It doesn’t fucking matter what he cares about.

If Roy wants him to want to hear it, then he will. If Roy said that in the first place, it must be because Roy wants to _say_ it—wants to describe this; wants to narrate; wants to parcel it up into words so that he can put an infinitesimal fraction of distance in between the living of it, and the act of a description.

Ed reaches out—

Roy flinches.

Ed hesitates with his hand in the air. Noises from the hallway—a cart rolling; heels clicking; someone raising their voice to argue with somebody else and then lowering it again before he can distinguish any of the words.

Roy swallows. He runs the tip of his tongue over his broken lip.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he’s making the discovery of it as he speaks. Like he’s confused about it, more than anything.

Ed won’t ask if he flinched away from Riza. Won’t ever. Doesn’t matter what he cares about. Doesn’t matter what he wants.

“It’s okay,” Ed says. Gently, gently, he sets his hand on Roy’s forearm. He doesn’t curl his fingers. “Who was it?”

“You remember that nationalist group that I was telling you about a few months ago?” Roy says. The rasp in his voice leaches out all the velvet. He sounds like a different person.

He is.

“The one,” Roy says, as if Ed could possibly have forgotten, “that is so opposed to my pro-Ishval legislation that they tried to gas my office.”

Ed works the words around in his mouth for long enough that they start to taste wrong. “So opposed that they’d fucking kidnap you off the street, too, apparently.”

“Apparently,” Roy says. His eyes keep drifting away from Ed and fixating on the blank wall across from the bed before they drift back. His nose is definitely broken. He has such a cute nose. They left his eyes alone; Ed _knows_ how fragile eyes are, knows he should be on his knees thanking the stupid fucking universe— “They just starved me for the first two days. But when push came to shove this morning, they… were unswayed by my extremely compelling argument that I could not undo any of said legislation if I was dead. That was the point at which I realized that their primary objective had to be ripping me to shreds and letting my corpse be a message—a message that they could destroy even the strongest of us, presumably. That changed the game somewhat.”

Ed sits very, very still and looks down at the white gauze that must have Roy’s hands buried underneath.

That must have most of them, at least.

The room is tilting, or the world is. He doesn’t know which. His stomach is one giant fucking knot; his chest hurts.

“They fucked up,” he says.

“In the grand tradition,” Roy says. “Passionate people make mistakes. They did do their homework. They figured out how Flame Alchemy works. But they understandably assumed that I need an array for a transmutation. One of them was a smoker. I made a big point of coughing and complaining about the smell. They forgot that I work with Havoc, or possibly just never learned enough about him to find that relevant. I was hoping that they’d be so intent on maximizing my misery that he’d come back in with a lit cigarette so that he could wave it in my face.”

Ed tries to say something gentle, something nice.

The truth comes out. Usually Roy’s all right with that, but now— “Fucking _idiots_.”

Roy looks down at Ed’s hand, and then over at the other wall. There’s a window Mint-green curtains. Hospitals didn’t used to make Ed’s skin crawl quite like this.

“I made them,” Roy says.

Ed chokes on his next breath; his fingers tighten around Roy’s arm in spite of all his efforts to stay relaxed. “What? Roy—”

“I always do,” Roy says. “I take ordinary people, and I change them—turn them into radicals; into killers; into soldiers. I did it to Riza.” He breathes. “I did it to you.”

Ed’s knuckles hurt.

“Get _fucked_ , Roy,” he says, and the words bubble out like they’re boiling in him; like they’re scalding every inch of his esophagus on the way up. “You have _never_ —you’re _wrong_. They had a fucking choice. They had a thousand fucking choices. So did Riza. So did I. You may be an arrogant fucking _bastard_ with a god complex, but even _you_ can’t _make_ people into something that they’re not. Their lives made them. The world made them. You’re part of it, but you didn’t _change_ them. They chose.”

Roy stares down at Ed’s hand. He wets his lips again.

“I love you,” he says, softly.

Usually Roy’s the one who reads between the lines and effusively interprets all the silences. Usually Roy’s the one who hears too much.

But Ed can just detect the undertow in that—the layers underneath it that don’t make the surface of it any less true.

Part of that _I love you_ is _I might not have had it in me to burn that place and those people to the ground if I had not known that you would carry the guilt of not having found me for the rest of your life_.

“There’s one advantage,” Roy says, slowly this time. “The brass never would have condemned them on principle, but a personal insult like this is going to force their hand. It’ll be… it might help, actually. It might be good.”

“Roy,” Ed says. He sounds hoarse now, too. Maybe it’s catching. “You didn’t deserve this.”

Roy is quiet for too long.

He lifts his gauze-wrapped hands and then lays them down again.

“They broke all of my fingers,” he says. He shifts the right hand again, angling it so that Ed can see again—the shape, the shape of it that just isn’t— “They cut off the smallest one. Just under the knuckle. Made a hell of a mess of it. I suppose that was probably intentional. I imagine that they meant to keep going, but that was about the time that the one with the cigarette came back.” He pauses, eyes distant again for a second. “Mathias, I think.”

He’s in shock.

Of course he’s in fucking _shock_ ; of course he can only fumble helplessly for empty, clinical, half-sardonic words. Of course he can only even hope to approach it sideways.

It’s going to collapse right in on him soon enough, but Ed succumbing to panic won’t make it any fucking easier for either of them.

Ed can’t dwell on the fact that they probably would have mailed Roy’s fucking fingers to Command. He can’t dwell on the fact that Roy’s body would have turned up mangled _almost_ past the point of recognition, in a ditch or a river or the middle of a busy fucking street—

He can’t think about what that would have been like.

He can’t think about what he might have done.

He gathers Roy’s bandaged hand very gingerly in both of his.

“You didn’t deserve that, either,” he says.

“It’s a pity,” Roy says, gazing down at all the gauze. Ed’s heart lodges in the back of his mouth, blood-hot and bile-bitter. “So much for my secret dream of becoming a world-class pianist.”

A laugh with an exoskeleton skitters in the base of Ed’s throat, but it doesn’t make it up past the blockage of the heart. “My fucking condolences,” he forces out. “You think—” He has to do this. He has to play along. If Roy’s at the point of pretending that they can joke about it, then that must be what’s best for him right now. “You think maybe you can beg off of some paperwork for a while?”

“Over one measly pinky finger?” Roy says. His mouth tightens in a way that might be a distant relative of an impulse to smile. “No chance. Its noble sacrifice was meaningless. Nothing to gain.” He tilts the wads of gauze outward, and the cotton whispers over Ed’s palms; and then he tips them back to where they were.

Ed swallows, swallows again, swallows _again_.

“There’s still hope,” Roy says, with that same almost-curious detachment that’s so much scarier than anger, so much worse than grief. “The doctors said that I might lose more of them. When they broke them—it was a sledgehammer. There might be fragments of bone that can’t be realigned, and if those start to move, or infiltrate my bloodstream, or whatever else they said, that… it would be… worse. So…”

Roy has such beautiful hands. Had. Would have. Still does, always _will_ , but—

It’s a stupid fucking thing to be broken-hearted over, but Ed’s always been so damn weak for every single fingertip. It’s not right. Nothing is, nothing is required to be, but it’s just— _not_.

“Winry could make you new ones,” Ed says. He hates every syllable with a viciousness that almost makes him feel awake. “They’d probably be pretty slick. If you… want. Y’know. I don’t get a cut out of referrals, or anything, so it’s—up to you. If you want to.”

Roy twists his wrists again, and then repositions them the way they were before. He doesn’t look up.

“Don’t suggest that too loudly,” he says. “I’m trying to convince Riza that I need a secretary and a signature stamp.”

“Why the hell would you stop there?” Ed says. “Thought you were supposed to be driven by ambition, Mustang. Ask her for a pony. Twenty-four-hour chauffeur. Butler—get a butler. They’d better throw you a fucking parade. With _strippers_.”

Roy’s shoulders tense up, and Ed’s heart ricochets in him so violently that his hands twitch, but—

Roy—

Chokes out something that sounds a little like a laugh.

“A fine idea,” Roy says. “I’ll rescind Elysia’s invite.”

“She’s old enough,” Ed says.

Roy raises an eyebrow, which probably hurts, but it makes him look so much more like _him_ that it stops Ed’s fucking throat again. “She’s… not.”

“Okay,” Ed says. He always forgets not to gauge other kids based on the extremely skewed standards of his own life. “Fair enough. It’d be really stupid to have gone through all this only to have Gracia kill you during your own parade.”

Roy looks at him for a long moment, almost-smiling, eyes so fucking tired and so beautiful and so dark and sad, and Ed’s guts twist up—

“Ed,” Roy says. He shifts over in the bed, trying to hide the wince; makes space beside himself and holds his arm out—

Ed kicks his shoes off, climbs up, and wraps both arms around him as tightly as he dares.

Which isn’t very tightly, as it turns out, because Roy tries to suppress another wince as Ed’s hand makes contact with his ribs. There’s a lot of gauze there, too.

But Roy leans his head against Ed’s and closes his eyes, and that…

Well. Roy’s alive. Ed doesn’t give a whole lot of a fuck about much of anything else past that.

  


* * *

  


He realizes that he nosedived into a thick, soupy sort of sleep when the tactful clearing of a throat yanks him back out of it.

Riza is standing a few steps away from the bed, holding a large white pizza box.

On second thought, maybe Ed’s still dreaming. Sure smells good, though.

“The only place that was still open was a bar,” Riza says. “But since we’re going to have to feed him for a while, I thought this might be an easy way to start.”

Ed glances at Roy, whose eyelashes look even heavier than his hands.

“Surely,” Roy says, voice still so sandpapery that it’s almost unfamiliar, “you mean a _cheesy_ way to start.”

Riza stands there for a second, gazing at him in abjection, before she sighs.

“I quit, sir,” she says as she comes over to the bed.

“What a coincidence,” Roy says. “Me, too.”

“Me, three,” Ed says.

Riza opens the box. She got more toppings than Ed can even estimate at a glance, which means there’s more than seven. One of them is bacon. If Ed hadn’t thrown his lot in so damn deep with Roy, he’d be very, very much in love with her right now.

“Despite some significant details,” Roy says, “today is shaping up to be a _great_ deal better than yesterday.”

Ed still wants to cry, and scream a lot, and spit on the graves of the fucking monsters that have done this.

But first he’s going to eat some fucking pizza, and take another nap, and coddle the absolute shit out of Roy until this all gets a little better—or at least a little less bad.

“You can fucking say that again,” he says.

“Excellent,” Roy says. “Despite some significant details—”

“I quit again,” Riza says. “Harder this time.”

Roy smiles wide enough this time that his lip starts bleeding.


End file.
